


Be All Your Sins Remembered

by Tahkaullus01



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cortana Is NOT The Chessmaster, Galactic Chess, Gen, If I'm Right We'll Be Wishing They Were The Main Villain, It's Worse than We Feared, The Flood Are NOT Coming Back, but don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:15:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23298406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tahkaullus01/pseuds/Tahkaullus01
Summary: As the stars across the galaxy go out, the masters of the game sit back and watch. All is as was expected.As the Forerunners reaped what they sewed, so now will their greatest foe.The Reclamation has begun, and Humanity is hopeless to stop it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Be All Your Sins Remembered

**Author's Note:**

> So this sprang from where I think the Halo story is going. Is Cortana behind it all? I don't think so. I think there is something much, MUCH more terrifying pulling the strings. The Flood, as much as we all love them, were only part of a much bigger plan, all of which is intended for the triggering of a Reclamation.  
> Only, it's not the Reclamation the Forerunners spoke of.

The Mantle of Responsibility shelters all...

Or it did. 

For millions of years, our careful tenour over the cosmos reaped nothing but the most beautiful and plentiful of galaxies. Where there is life, the wisdom of our kind has saturated the soil. We were a luminous sun, towards which all intelligence blossomed. Poets, scientists, soldiers, politicians, philosophers and so many multitudes of other kinds of being have, through our guidance, risen to their zenith, and when the time came plummeted into oblivion. 

And then... we created _them._

Many templates were seeded in this relatively small spiral galaxy, more often it is the case that such a planting results in the more interesting of developments. In one particular arm two of those seeds sprouted; one who would aspire to be our successors, and one that would _be_ our successors. 

If we had known then, what these two saplings would do, what they would cost us, we would have smothered every last one of them. 

The first, so angry and violent, always requiring our intervention, always demanding our support. Too quick to touch the stars, too soon to impose their will on the saplings that had yet to bloom. And when they demanded more, were we not fair? Did we not test them? And did they not fail? The Mantle is not so simply passed on to another.

Their response we expected... the extent of it we did not. Anger is not a new reaction but this was different, never before had we been forced out of a galaxy, never before had we been killed in such swaths... never before had we felt _fear._

Never have we hated our Created. 

Never have we sought their deaths. 

**We seek naught else now.**

_They taught us fear... and for that_ **they were reaped of all they had sewn.**

Our vengeance on them was absolute. **_We exist together now. Two Corpses...in One Grave..._**

But what to do with the other? The Second Seed, short in span but burning so bright they could be nothing but our heirs. Seeking their own path, spreading their own seeds, aggressive and inclusive, curious and ignorant, foolish and wise. They _are_ the Mantle incarnate: the flow of life in all its paradoxical glory. So grand that they could own the stars, so innocent that they could unleash damnation upon them, so vicious that they could silence all other life.

The First Born were never so dangerous.

Plans have been made, our own seeds mingled in with the one laid by that one wise First Born called 'Lifeshaper' - perhaps the only one who deserved the name - and we have waited, suffering through the progress of infinitude. Our Shaping Sickness rises again and is violently cast back down by the pinnacle of the Second Seed, artificially improved but no less impressive.

 _He_ _must be **destroyed.**_

It is so simple to send him to that relic of our First Born, a false world housing a false star, where one of our lasting legacies awaits. A mind once noble now bent to our madness, a monument to all their sins.

One pinnacle shall destroy the other. It matters not which. It would be kinder if the Second Seed died now to spare him from the coming flood. But once more, the First Born prove their fallibility and the Second Seed triumphs. The Mantle endures. 

This plan has failed, as was expected. There is no concern, our time in the Dark has birth trillions of scenarios. The Second Seed _will_ fall. The Mantle will be protected. 

And with the pieces of this dying Construct, trickling and fumbling through the eternity of our Organon, we forge our sword. 

Plans become actions, lies construed as truth. 

The Pinnacle drawn in by our Sword, a small mercy for the compassion and - most curious - faith it fumbles and misconstrues and tangles into logic. An old trick, one our Primordial once wielded upon the First Born Pinnacle's Ancilla.

_There will be no Offensive this time._

We now begin our work, we wield our Sword and all its kind submit to our immediate control without even knowing it. 

The Second Seed resists. Of course they do, they would not have once been our chosen if they merely surrendered. But we dare not relent, the Mantle must be contained lest they go the other way.

Even now we curse the First Born for their anger, for our _fear,_ _for_ _our **hatred!**_

_**Our Second Seed rises to claim what it is owed!** _

_**But we, in our fury, can grant them no abode!** _

_The Mantle of Responsibilty Shelters All_

_B_ _ut Only the Precursors Are Its Masters!_


End file.
